UI fun: Remove result

One request we sometimes hear is for the ability to modify Google results, especially to block unwanted sites. A few eagle-eyed people may have noticed a user-interface experiment on Google that adds the ability to remove results. Here’s what you’d see. Imagine that you did the search [lynx paw clipart], and you notice one particular result that looks spammy:
You check the cached page, and you notice that if you turn off Cascading Style Sheets, there’s a bunch of spammy text:

At that point, your options would normally be to 1) ignore that result, or 2) report the url to Google via our spam report form.

But if you’re in this experiment, you’ll have newfound powers. Click the “Remove result” link and with one click you can drop that url from your search results. It looks like this:
By default, it will only block that url for that particular search. If you’re really annoyed, you can click “More options” and you’ll get two more choices: block this url from all future searches and (my personal favorite) the ability to block the entire host from all future searches. Here’s what it looks like:

Before I tackle some questions, I want to send mad props to the people who worked on this in our New York office. This is one of my favorite UI experiments; it’s neat to give users the ability to modify some parts of Google, and I especially like the Ajax-y aspects of it. Okay, let me try to anticipate some questions.

Q: Why don’t I see “Remove result”? I want it! I want it baaad!
A: Dude, did you not read the last paragraph? It’s an experiment; if we showed it to everyone, it would be a beta. 😉 Oh, alright. Here’s a tip. Go sign up for My Search History/Personalized Search. You don’t have to store your searches, but you will need a Google Account.

Q: How exactly do I try this out?
A: If you have an email address like johnpublicuser@gmail.com, you should be able to go to http://www.google.com/psearch and sign in with “johnpublicuser@gmail.com” and your password–make sure to click “Remember me on this computer.” If you don’t have a Gmail account, you can create a Google Account at https://www.google.com/accounts/ . Once you are logged into your Google Account, click on “Personalized Search” on the left-hand side:
Once you are in Personalized Search, you should see the Remove Result link any time that you’re signed in.

Q: Are you going to use this data to improve general search?
A: It’s too early to say. It’s still an experiment that may not even launch; it depends on how people like it. The form or format could also change as well.

Again, thanks to the people who worked on this. I’ll be curious to see whether people enjoy it.

Interesting and useful for personal search results. However, if you wanted to use it for general Google results, I would assume you need to have some human intervention to investigate the flagged sites. Doesn’t it need an overwhelming resources?

Just to reiterate this test, if Alice removes a url from her search results, it won’t affect Bob’s search results. Nima, you would definitely need to have a lot of trust in that data to use it for general search quality, and it’s early to even be thinking about that. For now, it’s an experiment to see how people like it.

That’s nice and all, but it only helps me not see the spam. Hopefully in the near future you can see what sites get blocked wide-scale and implement your results the way you do by monitoring what sites get clicked in the SERPs. Great start, I love new Google stuff!

It would only disappear for you, NFFC. jimbeetle, this is mostly for people who are signed into their Google search account. There’s some similarity with Yahoo, but then there’s also some similarities to the voting buttons we’ve had in the Google toolbar for the last 4-5 years. Jeremy Zawodny had a good post a while ago about how search engines often are testing ideas in parallel, and how things that look like they are a reaction to one engine are really things being developed at both places at the same time.

Let’s hope people don’t click the ‘remove’ button on their competitors. I can imagine an experiment like ‘miserable failure’ where people go on some semi organized crusade to affect the data mining that’s going on.

Really, please: do this for real! I get so annoyed by the spammy links that come up some times. I just want real information, not an advert for an unsafe version of whatever I’m looking for. Could it be tied up to the spam report fundion (which should be more prominently displeyed on search results anyway)?….So that you could have a “Block this link and report as spam” button

I understand that it is an experiment. But I thought the ultimate objective is to recognize the spam sites and phase them out which is a step to the right direction. Even though it may be too early to trust the accumulated data and have it implemented.

So, what if I remove a site from my search results, and then that site fixes the spam problem (either they just fix it by will or thanks to your new re-inclusion program after they get banned)? Would that site be listed in my personal search results again or I have lost that site for good?

Matts, I like this idea. This should be working – and be used to remove the trash of the web. Hope, you’ll get it working in a usable way asap.
So a normal user – like me – can work against this spam poluters.

Is there another way where “we” as normal users can help Google to clean the web?

Tobias and Ed, I just added an extra question with more info and a screenshot for people who want to try this out. graywolf, we’re definitely aware we’d need to be able to handle that kind of thing without problems.

Hi, I use Personalized Search but I am not seeing “Remove Results”, although I really would like to. However, even though I’m using the US interface I’m in Europe, could that be a reason? Thanks in advance for an answer.

Harith, it looks like you’re already signed up for Personalized Search, because you get the option “Delete Personalized Search”. You and GoogleFan may want to make sure that you sign out and then sign back in again.

If you must have an account and accounts can be evaluated (profiled)according to the liklihhood that they are real people, then the aggregate data will work well for cleaning up spam entries, far better than any profile produced on the sites in question. People 1, Bots 0.

The Y toolbar can unblock sites very easily, I found this out when I accidentally blocked my own site while testing the toolbar. I would guess that “unremove” is a feature of remove…

When I search for “search engine” I got 463,000,000 results. Then I removed “google” using “For all searches, remove all pages from http://www.google.com” and I got the same number of results with Google removed. Maybe I am doing something wrong – prolly so.

Hey, this is pretty neat. I did the test query that you showed and went through and removed some results. Hopefully this information will eventually be used to thwart spammers. Right now I’ll probably only block sites that are easily recognized as spam (like http://buy-viagra-online.example.com/), because some sites might repent (if they have hidden text).

Also, I’m not sure what you can share, but I’d love to hear more about the infrastructure that allows all these personalized searches. I’ve read the PDF about the Google search cluster design, but it seems like it wouldn’t work as well when you get highly personalized results. I have some ideas about how it works, but if you can tell us about anything, that would be nice. That said, personalized searches are really working well for me now. I occasionally get some really valuable results that would otherwise be way down in the search pages.

I think its really useful. But its use goes beyond removing spammy sites. You can remove links that may not be spammy but are just not relevant to the context in which you are doing the search. I’ve already noticed that doing this can surface useful stuff that you may not have noticed because it was buried further down the serps.

Matt just out of curiosity, and as you you have been using the voting buttons for the last four years or so.. do more people hit the smiley face, or the sad face? I don’t think you’d be given too much away and I’m more interested in human nature than machines.

I will definitely enjoy this. As I mentioned in Berkeley, I see a lot of these “keyword driftnet” sites clogging up search results across all the major search engines, and some types of search are nearly impossible. Give me the ability to permanently remove domains from “my” search results, please.

Try searching for a PHP script to do *anything* – outside of a few (identical) listings on the big script archives (please donate a Google appliance to Hotscripts!), you get nothing but robo-spam. The new robo-spam trick is to scrape the software archive sites and throw a big Adsense box on top of the thing… please thank the paid search guys for buying all that spam, BTW.

Just don’t let anyone talk you into baking this into the regular search results without some serious thought about the concept of a “trusted user.” Community spam filtering works marginally well for email spam. Community filtering would work fine for search, for about 2 weeks, until someone starts a sweatshop in Jakarta to filter out their competitors… all of them. 😀

Ok I don’t understand why no one understands this feature yet. Nearly every comment refers to this as a way to block spammers for everyone else too. This type of system would be flooded almost immediately with spammers trying to take down sites that rank above them. Its possible that this removal could be a tiny factor in the results or perhaps Google could go towards a more SlashDot style method where you can filter at certain levels based on moderation and friend links.

But I still don’t understand what wasn’t clear about this post in that this is a ‘personalized’ result! Oh well its no wonder the spammers abound. People are still stupid enough to click on thier links.

Frankly looks like a waste of Google resources to me. How many average searchers are going to look at a cached page? Then change their browser settings to look at the page again? Thats something only webmasters would do IMHO.

The straggle between Google´s engineers and spam sites or sites which are not in accordance with Google´s quality guidelines has always fascinated me. Whenever there is an algo changes or implementation of new spam filters, I spend sometime studying the final effects. You develop a passion for finding spam sites which escape Google´s filters …”You filthy spammer they gonna get ya” you think.

However when it comes to some sites with primitive blackhat SEO techniques, I guess there is still a looooong way left to go, IMO.

What did I mean by “primitive blackhat SEO techniques”? Allow me to illustrate that:

While I was searching for ways to treat acne (for my daughter) I run a query (acne treatment) and found this site listed as #16 (depending on which datacenter your google.com hits). At the bottom of the front page you find the followings text in

Whether you call it acne, adult acne, acne rosacea or acne vulgaris one thing remains constant, the desire to get rid of acne through treatment, control and management of your acne condition. The successful treatment and management of acne, acne rosacea, acne vulgaris and adult acne can be accomplished through an understanding of the various medications and treatments used in the control of adult acne, rosacea, acne rosacea and skin conditions that co-exist with acne, such as lupus, eczema, psoriasis and seborrheic dermatitis. The information on acne, acne treatment, and acne-related lifestyles on this web site can help in the treatment of acne and acne rosacea. Acne sufferers who modify their lifestyles can experience a greater degree of acne clearing. Acne prevention and skin care involves the treatment of the symptoms of acne. In the treatment of the acne symptoms that are most visible and distressing, one must always seek a solution to their acne by treating the cause of acne! If we find and treat the cause of adult acne, then the symptoms of adult acne can be managed through proper acne control! Positive acne skin care can lessen the need for harsh, aggressive, and sometimes dangerous acne treatment medication.

Its something like such bla..bla..bla text that I consider “primitive blackhat SEO techniques”

Moreover and just under the said text, I found two links pointing to the same front page which they are on, something like this:

I like the idea, but I don’t know that I would use it enough to warrant its existence in general search results. I’ve developed a pretty keen eye for simply ignoring spam/extraneous websites as I scan results. It certainly can’t hurt, though.

Connie, do you propose that Google only ads features that benefit the mainstream users? As I power user, I would hate that. That said, I wish there was a way to block higher level domains, and not just the subdomain. All the spam sites have names like cheap-hotel-rates.hotel-sites.biz, where each result has a different subdomain, making it really hard to block with this scheme.

Thanks for the info TDavid. I was wondering why I do not see anything. Matt, what’s up with Opera support?

I would like to see this expanded with a forth option:

For all searches, remove all pages from logicway.com

Sites doing this subdomain styl spamming usualy have a horde of these. This way, one can get rid of them in one operation.

I would also welcome a way set one of the advanced options as the default. So I could remove the suckers with one click instead of four.

BTW: please get rid of the onload handler in the body tag of the result page (and the start page). I am on dialup. If I search and see, that I have misspelled something, every change I do in the search field be nulled when the result page finishes loading. This document.gs.reset() is just plain annoying, I fail to see how it makes google better for its users.

I seem to have the exact opposite problem from Stan. I’ll remove a link, but as soon as I redo the search, it’s there again . I’m using Mozilla 1.7 if that’s any help, but I think I had the same problem in Explorer too.

Just an update: I’ve tried it with two other Google Accounts I have , in which personalized search wasn’t enabled so far. When i enabled it there, it worked. However, when I use the account where it’s been enabled for a long time , it doesn’t work. I would rather use that account though because it’s got all my other history and stuff. Anyway, I just thought I’d let you know the bug exists and I hope it gets fixed soon.

Another suggestion I would is to include the option “remove all pages from this site for this search”.

I’ve removed results for several months using the CustomizeGoogle extension for Firefox. It also lets me import and export filters from friends. Using it’s powerful features makes me also use regular expressions to remove spam in a more general fashion.

And best of all – It lets me remove Google ads! LOL When are Google going to implement this as an option????

More specifically:
After pressing remove result it is highly likely that the users wants to remove all pages from the webaddress. It is really awkward to move the mouse from all the way to the right (“More options”) to all the way to the left to “For all searches…”.

There are a lot of sites that I would like to remove from my searches and at the moment it is very painful.

It would be awesome to share the “removed site knowledge” = anti-del.icio.us.

Now, to remove all instances of shoptag.com from my search results as punishment for sending me an unsolicited request to link to them in return for a list of “101 job interview questions most often asked by potential employers.” (?!?)

Why would I even want a list of job interview questions? Oh well, it’s a huge improvement over penis enlargement offers anyhow…

First spam mail that Gmail missed in ages. Kudos to the googly guys for the great record. Now if only I could use a bayesian classifer to sort my mail (like Popfile) instead of all of these crazy filters. That would truely be email heaven…

OT: It would be nice to have a way to consolidate different accounts. Is’s a mess to sign in to groups, sign out and sign in to mail/talk, then sign out to check AdSense (soon) … and every once in a while the cookie launches unexpected prompts like the superfluous questions whether I’d like to move all group subscriptions from account1 to account1 or not, with both buttons not functional 😉

The feature is a step in the right direction. Of course, the next phase would be a tool that once you hit a page from your search results you could rank your own percieved relevancy from what you were looking for to what Google found.

A 1-10 relevancy slider could be pretty useful to do the trick… It’d be a challenge, but imagine unique algorithms for each search user based on their search techinique…

I found that I can restore a result by searching for something that would normally yield that result and clicking “show omitted results” at the bottom … then it will show the removed link and give you an option to restore it.

“Hello everybody,
My name is Gianluca Brugnoli, and I’m a senior Information Architet and Researcher Professor in Milano, Italy. I have a little suggestion to improve your service.

When I do my web searches sometimes I need to exclude some sites / domains (the whole URL) from my results. There’s a lot of garbage and fake pages around the web that makes some searches really boring and difficult.
This function/option will be really useful the refine the search, in order to cut-off some garbage, fake pages, or useless domains.

On the user side, this function should be used in the same way I can see more results from a specific domain. For example, with a message like: “[Exclude all results from: http://www.thisdomain.com” under the single result line.

An improved way to access this function is to create / save a personal
black-list of domains I don’t want really to search at all.

I wish you will find this useful.
Best regards

>>> Gianluca Brugnoli”

Ok, I agree that this not the invention of the wheel, and that many people made the same request. But finally, they did it! Almost in the same way I’ve described it in my email. It’s a nice surprise for me.
Thanks everybody.

Seriously, lol, to compete for keywords like Arcade Games is crazy now days because of all the black hat sites that are flooding the comptetion, making it really hard for us real people to rank NORMAL.

Does anyone know how FAST that remove result page works? Like if you submitted a TRUE spam result, how long would it take before they are out of google?

I may be using this feature wrong because I cannot seem to get it to work.

If I conduct a search on Google. I see some site I don’t ever want to appear again in my searches. so I open that link. Then when I next look in Search History I will see the search I did and the site I visited. So I check the Remove box and I should never see it again.

Is that right?

Here is my experience.

I do a search for “ecercise DVDs” say ,and get results including Amazon.com.

Just suppose I don’t want ever to see Amazon’s site in my hits. I click on the hit link, go to Amazon. Back to the search and open Search History.

I click on Remove in the left margin and check the box next to Amazon.

Now I do the search again and Amazon is still in the results.

so what am I doing wrong? Or did I not understand what this feature is doing?

Well this becoz of different Datacenters of Google I also came across with the same prob and found on one IP I m able to see the remove results box and on the another IP I m not . Well this is a good technique to show the bin to all the non satisfying results.

I enjoy its ability to kill spammy stuff as well as some parody websites I’d rather not run into (take for example a .org that parodized a well-known .gov). Unfortunately it hasn’t been showing up lately, even though I am logged in. I hope it hasn’t been removed.

Great feature! I was a bit confused to make this thing work but eventually, I’ve made it through. I’ve been seeing a lot of spammy search results and it’s been always a pain hitting on the back button. This thing will save so much valuable time and a lot of bandwidth

But how would you know the real result if you keep on removing search result items? is this one of Google’s plan to push the relevancy issue by involving searchers(feedbacks) in judging what is relevant?

IMHO, the experiment only shows the limited capacity of google to filter out spammy sites and to directly point who are good ones. This only means that black hat seos can still prevail and control search engine rankings. I wonder there are still a lot of spammers around.

I hate google – and all the sites are full of spam – have a look at this website about black hat seo Black Hat SEO, you can see everyone is filling google with spam and they do nothing about it, because their google adwords appear on all the spam pages and get clicked so google are making money out of all the spam and scraper sites.

Does this still go through some type of manual approval and inspection? And not just based on a restriction result algorithm? Maybe people are still needed so they can check if their site is being SEO Sabotaged. And maybe the site of the reporter should also be looked into.